“Ma’am! How are you?” an excited voice floated across the supermarket aisle. I had moved jobs and cities, but my past as a college lecturer always manages to catch up.
A young woman in her 30s with a five-year-old in tow gave me a warm hug. When you’ve taught hundreds of girls, you tend to forget names but remember the faces. But this was one name and face I would never forget.
She was in the first batch of students I taught.
I was a little older than the class, having just completed my Masters. I decided to teach because it was one way of honing your subject when preparing for the civil services. So here I was in front of a gallery of giggling, smirking girls who, from the looks of it, clearly thought they could walk over me — I set about being a martinet from day one.
She was among those who gave the least trouble. Nose always buried in books, researching and writing in the library when there was no such ready-reckoner as the Internet. The kind who asked questions in class, often, because she already knew the answers and was here to prove a point. She had a chip on her shoulder, and it was obvious.
And it surfaced in ways I found tiresome. While the rest of the class warmed up like you only can with a teacher your age, she stayed aloof.
Once, back after semester holidays, I found her sobbing alone in the car park. Exam results or boyfriend trouble, I thought and got into the car to leave. “May I speak with you?” she asked.
Could I find her eight-year-old sister, studying in her hometown, a place to stay in the city? What could probably warrant her to move a younger sibling away from her parents? “Is there some kind of emergency at home?” I asked.
And then in that gathering dusk, reluctantly, a blacker truth was revealed.
She spoke of her father’s shadow darkening her bedroom door. Of his hands touching parts of her body they should never have.
His quelling of her instinct with the words “some fathers love their daughters this way”.
Of her mother’s silence and inability to help. And how it stopped only after she joined boarding school and spent holidays elsewhere. Now, it was her sister’s turn.
The college moved heaven and earth to help the girls. The father died a tragic death, shortly after that. The sisters went on to win laurels — she is a law enforcement officer, her sister is studying to be a lawyer.
As we walk to the billing counter, she tells me that somehow she has learnt to trust all over again. “My husband is a good man,” she says. “But sometimes, I ask my daughter the ways her father loves her.”
